Friday, July 29, 2016

Presentism, open future and spoken sentences

It is an essential feature of a sentence token that it has the number of words it does.

Suppose I am now saying a sentence, and have so far uttered the four words "The sky is blue". Let S be my sentence token. Then:

There is no fact whether the sentence I am now saying is four words long.

For whether it is four words long depends on what I will go on to say, and that depends on my free will, and so by open future, there is no fact about it. But

It is a fact that the sentence I am now saying is S.

So:

There is no fact whether S is four words long.

But necessities are never open, and what essential features an object has (if it exists) is a matter of necessity. Hence (5) contradicts (2).

There is a host of premises one can use in place of (2). For instance, it seems to be an essential feature of a spoken sentence token that it ends with a particular sound, or that it has such-and-such grammatical form in such-and-such a language.

19 comments:

Why not think that (4) is false because it's not even a fact that what you're in the midst of uttering is a sentence? Suppose you continue another two words, uttering "The sky is blue and I--" at which point you are cut off by some shocking occurrence nearby or by sudden cardiac arrest. What you've uttered is not a sentence. Ergo, it's not a fact that the sentence you are uttering is S and (4) is false.

Is this line of thought misguided because the sentence you are saying is determined by a prior thought that provoked the utterance, which thought either was explicitly formulated mentally into an English sentence or somehow makes it the case that there is a particular sentence you are in the midst of uttering? Or because there is a true counterfactual, specifying which sentence you would have uttered if nothing had interfered (which counterfactual is presumably made true by one's prior thought or the direction such thoughts were headed)? Even if there are such prior thoughts or such a counterfactual truth, it still seems (4) is false because there is no sentence you *are* uttering. Only one you *would* utter.

Good point. Instead of "sentence", I should talk of "sequence of words" or "utterance" or something like that.

Note, though, that if your point goes through, things are even worse for the open futurist presentist. For it seems to be never true that a sentence token event exists. For it can only exist while it is being spoken, and while it is spoken there is no fact about whether what is being spoken is a sentence. And it seems an essential feature of a sentence token that it's a sentence token.

Pruss: Bran W has hit the nail on the head, I think, and it elucidates a deep issue in your recent posts of this kind. We may THINK or INTEND a particular sentence, and we may initiate it, but lots of things could stop us from finishing it as intended. The goal of these philosophical discussions should be clarity on what is meant in ordinary speech by "he is saying X". In ordinary speech, we just mean that he clearly intends X. We could be wrong (either because he is tricking us and intends to finish it differently, or because some unforeseen circumstances stops him from finishing), but nobody thinks we are looking into the future of his complete statement. It should be obvious from introspection that we are making a statement about his INTENT.

The problem in *this* post is special to the *combination* of open future and presentism.

For: 1. If the future is open, spoken sentence tokens exist only when complete. 2. If presentism is true, spoken sentence tokens exist only when being spoken.But while being spoken, the tokens are not complete (since there is always the possibility of more being added). So, if the future is open and presentism is true, there are no sentence token.

Open future doesn't say anything about "when things exist". Presentism does. It's apples and oranges. Open future just says that statements about the future have no truth value. As I've emphasized, incomplete statements of any sort obviously have no truth values (I think this is obvious regardless of your view on the future). Presentism doesn't say that an incomplete statement has a truth value either.

So the situation is really this:1) If the future is open, spoken sentence tokens only have truth values once fully spoken.2) If presentism is true, the spoken sentence token only existed while it was being spoken.

And nothing at all follows from this. They just address two different questions, as far as I can tell.

Right: if you accept open future but NOT presentism, the argument isn't for you. The argument is only for those who accept both. Anecdotal data indicates to me that there is a large overlap between open futurists and presentists. I'm glad you're not in the overlap.

You misunderstand: I am both an open futurist and a presentist. But Open Future says absolutely nothing about "when things exist". So your point "1" is mistaken, and I think that's the crucial error here.

My response to your initial post is that there is no such thing as "the sentence I'm uttering"; merely "the sentence I INTEND to utter", which is all we ever mean in normal speech when we say "I'm saying such-and-such".

My response to your later formulation with just the 1 and 2 is that 1 is mistaken in saying that open future has anything to do with "when things exist".

The former is more relevant than the latter, so let me just add that I don't think anyone has ever meant "I know the future of this current sentence token, and it is definitely X, therefore Paul is currently uttering the X sentence token" when they made statements about what Paul is currently saying. All they mean is what he probably intends to say or seems to be in the midst of saying. Granted, intent is a slippery topic, but I'm rather confident that it's the only thing we're getting at when we talk about what someone "is doing".

But if x was spoken, then x existed. When did x exist? Either timelessly, or while it was being spoken, or before it was being spoken, or afterwards. By presentism, it existed neither timelessly nor before nor after it was spoken. So if it existed, it existed while it was spoken. But my argument shows that there was no fact about x's essential properties while it was spoken, so it couldn't have existed while it was spoken either. So it never existed.

Doesn't it seem common sensical that the full sentence token existed at the moment it was finished? The last word uttered is more than just that word in vacuo; it carries with it the completion of the sentence token (just like the current hit carries the "practice" in the other conversation).

1. The presentism problem. The sentence token "The sky is blue" is made of four word tokens. When "blue" is being spoken, the first three word tokens don't exist. Maybe this isn't such a big problem--it's the subject matter of our other discussion, about hitting and practices, though.

2. The open future problem. Let's say that I am now uttering the last sound in "blue". Given open future, it is still open whether I will stop now or continue speaking. In particular, there is no fact as to whether my sentence is "The sky is blue" or my sentence is "The sky is blue and 2+2=5". It is only after what I elsewhere called "a decent pause" that there comes to be a fact of the matter that my sentence was "The sky is blue"--but by then, given presentism, the sentence no longer exists.

I think point 1 elucidates a very key insight about presentism: On presentism, the current moment is partially defined by the past causal chain which led to it. It is permeated and delineated by that which produced it and which it is continuing. So, the word token "blue" at the end of "the sky is blue" is a different word token then the word token "blue" at the end of "this apple is blue", with very different baggage (all of which exists in the present as baggage).

2) I think past sentences do exist in the "baggage" sense of my above point. In the present, it is true that you have finished your utterance, and that it was a true utterance. There was no fact of the matter about which sentence you "were uttering" except in the common, obvious sense that you INTENDED a particular sentence. After it is complete, it can have a truth value. And the present state of affairs (the only state that "exists", what with "exist" being in the present tense and all) is such that it is TRUE that you DID utter that full sentence truthfully.

Having said that, I realize that I mean "the WORD blue"; not "the word TOKEN blue". I'm not sure that "word TOKENS" really exist. I don't think a pawn is a pawn unless chess exists. Some piece of wood could be carved that way, but it isn't a pawn. Likewise, I don't think "blue" is a word token; I think it is a different piece in a different game depending on which sentence (and which kind of sentence) I'm uttering. So, feel free to interpret my point #1 in terms of WORDS rather than TOKENS.

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